


Anniversaries

by likethenight



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Anniversaries, F/M, Gen, M/M, happy 10th anniversary king arthur!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 06:16:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1929855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gawain marks many anniversaries. Written for the tenth anniversary of the film's release in July 2004. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anniversaries

**Author's Note:**

> This one's for all my fellow fans on the tenth anniversary - how is it ten years already? I've had so much fun in this little fandom, and returning to it always feels like coming home to old friends. I hope you enjoy this little offering.

Gawain had always been the sort of man who remembered and marked anniversaries. He kept them quietly, for the most part, with a murmured word or two or a flagon of ale drained with a particular thought in his mind and a small smile on his lips, a glance at the sky or out over the hills. He didn’t need the Romans’ calendar to determine the days; he was a man of the earth and the winds, the turning of the seasons and the passing of the days running in his blood. He might not know the exact day every time, but he knew the time of the year, the way the air tasted on his tongue and where the sun was hanging in the sky, closely enough to mark the time. So the tipping of spring into summer, mostly still rain and mud but with enough sun to bring forth the first green shoots, marked the time when he had first set foot on these shores, and a month or so later, the time of his first glimpse of the Wall, of the man who would be his commander and, later, his king. And of course some of the men who would be his brothers in arms, whose faces he had first seen on that day, too. 

He was less sure of the day he had left his home, the day the Romans had come and called upon him to fulfil his forefathers’ debt, because the wind blew differently in Britannia, the seasons turned more wetly and the sun looked different, but he knew it had been at the beginning of the Sarmatian autumn, nine months or so before their arrival at the Wall, and so he marked it at summer’s end when the leaves were beginning to turn from green to gold. Nine months of travel, a long and strange gestation that birthed him a warrior at the end of it. Well, a warrior-to-be, at least. There were long months of training after that, but still. He was not the boy he had been when he had left home, when at last he had ridden through the fortress gate. Summer’s end was for leaving, then, and for meeting the boys who would become the men with whom he would share the rest of his life. 

Summer’s end for leaving, its beginning for arriving, the darkness of winter for the anniversary of his own birth, just three days before the solstice. His mother had always said his arrival had brought light at the darkest time of the year, and then she would laugh and say that after that he’d been nothing but trouble, but he’d always known she didn’t mean it. Gawain would forever associate the fires and the burning of branches with his birthday; as a child he had half-thought the celebrations were for him, before he’d understood the true significance of the festival. The midsummer solstice for Galahad’s birthday, his own mirror and counterweight in this as in so many other things. 

And the middle of spring for the gaining of their freedom and the loss of the last of his shieldbrothers other than Bors and Galahad, the battle of Badon Hill following hard upon the heels of the death of Dagonet and the granting of their papers. The leaves had been fully unfurled on the trees, but north of the Wall the weather had been sharply, bitterly colder, a sudden snowstorm and a lake thick with ice. It had been the strangest combination of weather Gawain had ever seen, and he wondered in later years whether perhaps the gods had been attempting to warn them of what was coming, the strange weather a harbinger of the foreign attackers waiting to sweep down upon them. Perhaps the Saxons brought the weather with them. Gawain did not try to understand it; he simply marked the anniversary along with the others, not alone in this one, at least. They would all assemble and drink and mourn, celebrating their freedom and remembering their dead all at once, for Dagonet, Tristan and Lancelot were free men too, now, for all that they were no longer with them. One by one they would steal away to the cemetery, to visit their lost ones at the anniversary of their departure, Bors and Lucan to Dagonet’s grave, Arthur to the site of Lancelot’s pyre, usually followed not long afterwards by Guinevere, and Gawain and Galahad to all three of them, one by one, raising their flagons in silent salute.

Gawain kept another anniversary in the cemetery, at the cold, wet end of winter just around Imbolc, visiting the graves of his brothers; he would drop in on them throughout the year, but at the anniversary of their funeral he would go for longer and take a flagon of wine or ale, often accompanied by Galahad, and spend a few hours sitting by their swords thrust into the earth, talking to their ghosts in a low voice, telling them everything that had been going on throughout the year. When he was done he would pour the last of the contents of his flagon as a libation on their graves and murmur a brief prayer to the Horse Mother to look after their spirits. 

But not all of the anniversaries were sad ones. The day at the end of spring when Arthur married Guinevere and the nations of the Romans and the Britons became one, bittersweet as it had been it was still a cause for celebration. And the day not long after at the beginning of summer, when Bors finally married Vanora and put a seal on their family for good - not nearly so bittersweet, that one, and nobody had stirred from their beds for at least two days afterwards, everyone laid low by the amount of drink they’d consumed. 

Gawain marked no anniversary for the claiming of his own heart, but he didn’t need to; it coincided perfectly with the day he had left his home in Sarmatia, when he had ridden his horse up to the group of boys with the Romans and had found himself next to a boy of his own age with unruly dark curls and bright blue eyes who had given him a tight, worried smile. They had collected Galahad only the day before, Gawain had found out later, which explained the tension; it had taken Galahad a week or so to relax, to to let go of the worst of his homesickness and for the two boys to become friends. It had taken rather longer for their friendship to deepen into something more, but the seed of it had been sown that first day. 

Every day was an anniversary of sorts, and Galahad would sometimes tease Gawain that as he grew older he was spending more and more time talking to the gods about the past, and less and less time paying attention to the present. Gawain would roll his eyes and point out that he still knew, for instance, how many children Bors currently had, which was more than Galahad did - or indeed Bors himself. Gawain suspected that Vanora and he were the only people in the fort who actually knew the correct number. Besides, he liked his anniversaries; they anchored him, keeping him grounded when he might otherwise have felt a little adrift here in this life he had not chosen. Although when it came down to it, the choice to leave his childhood home may not have been his own, but he had made his own decision when it came to staying in the home of his adulthood. His loyalty lay with Arthur, with Galahad and with Bors and Vanora and their troop of bastards, with their new united people and with the wet green land that had become somehow woven into his soul. When that had happened he did not know, so he couldn’t mark it, but it meant no less for all that.


End file.
